162: Bedwetting & Solving Medical Mysteries with Our Strong-Willed or Highly Sensitive Kids: Part 1

0 (1s):
My name is Randi Rubenstein, and welcome to the Mastermind Parenting Podcast at Mastermind Parenting. We’re on a mission to support strong-willed kids and the families that love them. You’re listening to the Mastermind Parenting Podcast with Randi Rubenstein episode 1 62. Hi. Okay. I’m here with Lindsay. Lindsey works with me. She is my number two. She is my membership manager for Mastermind Parenting, and she’s a mom in the trenches. So I’m always studying Lindsey. I’m always studying all of the people that I work with because I it’s very hard to reverse engineer a process. I’ve been telling Lindsey this it’s hard to reverse engineer a process. So it was like, I knew I had figured something out and then to sort of, I don’t know, take the steps out of it and teach it to other people for me has been one of the most challenging things.

0 (51s):
And now that I’ve older kids, I’m always sort of noticing how my approaches and my tools and the way that I teach them affect other people. And Lindsey is my membership manager because I made a decision after hiring different people over the years who either weren’t moms or didn’t know, Mastermind Parenting, weren’t familiar with the process. I was like, that’s it. I’m only hiring people for the team who fully understand what we’re doing here. And Lindsey was a mom and she was living it and super coachable. And just, I don’t know, you can speak for yourself. Like you were just drinking the Kool-Aid. Yeah,

1 (1m 22s):
I mean, I had been trying to help my son for such a long time that, you know, once I tried a few things out and saw the positive changes happening, I knew that I was on the right track because I had been on the wrong track for quite some time.

0 (1m 42s):
Well, and you know, so she was just like, yeah, she was, she’d gone to all the specialists. And the, I mean, we were just talking about someone we know who recently had a baby and she just, every single thing, she runs by her pediatrician. And that is our culture, you know, when you’re having a new baby. And when you have a kid with things you’re worried about you go to the pediatrician, like, that’s your point person? And we have several pediatricians that we work with that are in our program. And they’ve told us that they don’t receive behavior training. You know? So when you say to your pediatrician, my kid’s doing X, Y, and Z. They’re going to refer you out. And then you find yourself going down the rabbit hole. As many of us stay going to specialist after specialist, after specialist,

1 (2m 22s):
I’m laughing because at the beginning she started with saying, it took her a long time to like put the process together and you’re reverse engineering. And I always say to you, like how in the world did you figure it out so easily? Because,

0 (2m 34s):
But it wasn’t so easy. You always say it

1 (2m 35s):
Wasn’t so easy because by the time I arrived, you had already figured out a lot of it.

0 (2m 42s):
Well, a lot of it, the thing is, is that I think I figured it out because I’m a rebel tendency. And I knew that I would try lots of things, but the minute, I mean, it’s actually a problem. You heard Naomi recently in our, we had a meeting, a business meeting with our marketing person who helps us. And she was like, okay, we’re going to try this approach. And we’re not going to pivot when we, you know, before we give it time to work, because that’s me, I’m such a pivot. Or I’m like, okay, I’ll try it. I’ll try anything. And when I don’t see results, I’ll just pivot and pivot and pivot. And that is how I ultimately figured this out. And sometimes you have to stick with the process and pivoting too early is true.

1 (3m 17s):
And my pivoting was done before meeting you and doing this work. It was pivot after pivot, after seminar people being like, either I can’t help you anymore. You need somebody else or y’all are good. Like see you later. Or like, oh, something’s really wrong. You need to go

0 (3m 34s):
Right. Go to this, go to this therapist and that therapist. And we like a lot of therapists, but if you’re not doing things at home yourself, then it’s like one hour a week and it’s not going to affect huge changes. So I’ve been studying Lindsey lately because I’m always setting Lindsey, but she’s been on this ride for a while. And I’m really just stuck with figuring out what’s going on with her son. She has three sons, but her, one of her sons is the one that she has been, you know, the most worried about. And he’s 10 now, 10, he’s almost 11, almost 11. And so can we talk about, yeah.

1 (4m 12s):
Okay. So it’s fine.

0 (4m 14s):
So there’s an alert we’ve noticed, I’ve heard this is pretty common, but there’s a chronic bedwetting issue and his body literally just doesn’t receive the signal to get up and go to the bathroom or to hold it all night. And so this has been over a decade of an issue and

1 (4m 31s):
We’ve been given a prescription medication for him to try. That stops the fluid. I don’t really understand. It stops the process of paying. And I was so freaked out about summer camp that I actually, you know, got the script and filled it. And even, I think they gave it to him either once or twice until I found out that the side effects were like some, maybe a brain bleed of some sort could happen. If you drink water too close to bed time, I was like, oh my God, I’m sending him off to sleep away camp. I called David. I was like, throw that in the trash now. And so, yeah, it’s been chronic. And the biggest gift was when a few years back you gave me the blessing of bringing him back the pull up.

0 (5m 15s):
Yeah. Yeah. Cause it was like, it was like changing sheets. Every single morning

1 (5m 19s):
Is worried that if I brought the pull-up pack, like that would stall his progress. And I remember when it shifted to like, dude, you’re awesome. Like, let’s just give it a rest and we’ll revisit it. But his little body a year of pull-ups and it was like, he finally, I was like, thank you, mama. Like, it just took the pressure off. And it was great. I was like,

0 (5m 38s):
He doesn’t want to be wetting his bed every night or back there. Right.

1 (5m 41s):
We’re back in the lower back and no pull-ups and back in the bed wedding once again. So that kind of brings us to present time of taking, I think it was like an eight and a half. We put the pull-up back on for a year and then he went to sleep away camps. We were like, okay, we’re done. We’re going to get a go again. And yeah, here we are. And we recently just found out through a local dentist office, a dentist. She was the one who connected a bunch of dots and really looked at Daniel’s mouth and how his tongue, all of the function of the mouth and not to go in reverse order.

1 (6m 27s):
But like, we’d been dropouts of going to therapy for a while, once he was doing better and feeling better and not depressed and less anxious. So we got our household that are like, we stopped, he stopped going to therapy because it wasn’t necessary. And so when the dentist that’s awesome, Dennis was like, he needed speech the first time she told me, I don’t even remember, but it was the second time she recommended it that I was like, why? Because the first time I was like, no, no we’re therapy dropouts. Cause it was traumatic for my child taking him to therapy. Cause I the, is it the tiger mom? Or you were just, I was trying to fix him, which is what created a bigger problem

0 (7m 7s):
Because he was so dysregulated. He wasn’t getting the right amount of sleep. It was just like a whole host of issues. And so then of course he had behavior issues. He’s highly sensitive and he felt

1 (7m 16s):
A patient. And after

0 (7m 17s):
A full day of school, he’s exhausted. He’s taking in stimuli at a heightened degree as a highly sensitive little person. His nervous system is like, ah, you know, vibrating, like, you know, out of whack. And then he’s being schlepped to therapy appointments. And so he was, you know, Lindsey tells a story about how she would, you know, he, they go to the therapy appointments and then afterwards the kid has to wait. And while the therapist debriefs the mom and he would like stick his fingers in Lindsey’s ears. So,

1 (7m 47s):
And then get in trouble for it by the therapist, you know, it took me a while to figure out, leave them with that man. Cause I was just used to angry email tons all the time.

0 (7m 55s):
Right. And he would stick his fingers in our ears and all behaviors, communication. Like literally he was a little kid that if he had had the language, he would have been like, mom, you’re trying to fix me. I’m already exhausted. Then you’re shopping me to this therapy appointment. And now you want me to wait so you can get debriefed. Why don’t you tell the lady to send you an email? You know, like, don’t talk about me, but he didn’t. Yeah. He was like, don’t talk about me. Don’t talk about me. And normally we just focus on that behavior, but really these insightful little beings are saying, you’re not doing what I need. Please keep trying to figure this out. And so no you didn’t. And so, so anyway, as Lindsay’s learned and, and change things and really helped him to come out of this place of defensiveness and be more connected to her and she doesn’t, she would, you know, now you would never like you listen to the signals that he’s giving you.

0 (8m 39s):
And so it’s just not an issue anymore. So he’s obviously gotten a lot more cooperative and oh yeah. And he’s just, you know, it’s just night and day difference. But this bed, chronic bedwetting thing has been an ongoing issue.

1 (8m 52s):
And that was the one Pete. So the dentist talking about the airway and speech and I was like, didn’t never a chance to talk because sometimes what did he say? I can get excited and I’m like, rambly, it happens. And just, you know, what is that? The white parts, the dark part. So you got to love all of me, all the parts. Yeah. What was I saying? So,

0 (9m 14s):
So anyway, so finally you’re getting somewhere and you, I mean, it started with getting a proper evaluation by a neurologist then going to this dentist, which she’s sort of a holistic type dentist, right? Like,

1 (9m 26s):
Yeah. Apparently, cause she’s like the mouth isn’t working. And I finally like, why does he need to go to sweet? She’s like his tongue isn’t working. I was like, oh yeah. Back in the day, when he went to OT, he went to cognitive behavioral therapy, playgroup. He went to psychology psychology for

0 (9m 44s):
Years. What’s that? You mean psychological counseling? Like it was

1 (9m 47s):
Organized playgroup. So back in the day, his tongue used to sit outside of his mouth and it did get corrected in speech, but we didn’t realize that there were actually areas of his tongue that have to be clipped that were restricting the movement. And she’s like a lot of times that can cause problems with sleep. And I was like, oh yeah. I mean, you mean like bedwetting? And she’s like, yeah, exactly. And ADHD symptoms. And I was like, tell me more. I was like, what do you mean? And it was this crazy process where she sent me to a dentist that specializes in airway health, which is, this is trendy. All of these professionals told me this is trendy. This is new. That some of this research is kind of hot and, and new. Like people are really learning that when you’re not breathing at night, how it can affect your sleep cycle, it can cause things like bedwetting, there’s a medical name for it.

1 (10m 32s):
I don’t know off the top of my mind. And a lot of times when your mouth and tongue and all of that, isn’t working, you don’t sleep well. And as a result, you have ADHD symptoms. So,

0 (10m 45s):
Well that’s not new. I mean, the thing we know is that ADHD symptoms and sleep deprivation are the same. Then you’re away. I mean, I’ve been raising hell about that for a long time. Like why, when you go to the pediatrician and you’re explaining that the teachers are saying your kid has a hard time focusing, the other kids are able to control themselves and raise their hand and wait to be called on and your kid can’t and your kid’s so different and shame and shame and shame and shame and shame. They, they probably have ADHD. Why isn’t anyone saying, tell me about their sleep hygiene. Well, let’s take it

1 (11m 16s):
Back a step sista. And why is that with a little baby? A four-year-old a, three-year-old a five-year-old those were the ages. He had surgery to get tubes in his ears. And nobody looked at his tongue. What we know about tongues that don’t work well. What I know now is that saliva you swallow, but when your tongue doesn’t push this alignment down, it causes a pooling. He didn’t really have infections. He had three sets of tubes because he had chronic fluid in his ears. And so he would have the tubes and sometimes it would drain clear. Sometimes it would drain yellow time on an airplane. It drained green with it out in my hand.

0 (11m 57s):
TMI. Yeah. But

1 (11m 59s):
You changed the ratings. Yeah.

0 (11m 60s):
Yes. I know. But well, that’s not, it, it’s not explicit. It’s just TMI for me. Cause we’re making me squeamish.

1 (12m 6s):
I had to be squeamish. I feel like you fluid, like really? And he remembers it. And the F the F the not funny thing is that in addition to these ear tubes that did the job, he was left with a hole in his ear and had to have this pretty dramatic traumatic for him and me where they like, had to remove the skin from behind. But I’m saying like, okay. So my point was just, it was, I was just like remembering

0 (12m 34s):
Frenectomy yes.

1 (12m 35s):
Ever for anatomy. And if he had had it for next year, when he was two, he wouldn’t have had any,

0 (12m 39s):
I lead nowadays. I mean, my niece had this. She was having a hard time latching when she was a newborn baby. And, you know, she’s six. So there’s, if you’re, if you’re with a medical professional that stays up to date on what the latest and greatest, you know, just different remedies are, you get sent to the right specialist. And my, and my niece, it was, I think they had to actually drive. They were maybe, I think they had to go to Dallas actually to like, to another city to find, to go to this specific surgeon that would, you know, be able to operate on her. And it was the exact same thing that her tongue wasn’t doing what it needed to do for her to latch on.

0 (13m 20s):
And so they, they were able to find this out when she was a teeny tiny baby. So now we’re a decade, that’s

1 (13m 27s):
The gory details

0 (13m 28s):
The decade. So now we’re a decade in, and he basically has to have a procedure that now, but back 10 years ago, maybe this just wasn’t as common knowledge. Right. So that, so we’re going to give a little bit of a hall pass there. Right. And we’re going to try to, now what we want you guys to, to hear from this whole experience is if you have a chronic bed wetter, if you, if there’s just some medical issues that you ha, you’re just like, we can’t totally figure this out. We want you to dig deeper. Like, that’s what I like Lindsey has had no quit. And I was the same. Like I did a bunch of like bullshit thing. I mean, I tried anything that I don’t, I don’t think Alec remembers, but sometimes I just tell them about some of the, you know, cockamamie things that we did, but we had no quit.

0 (14m 10s):
And so what I want to encourage anyone listening to this to do is like, keep at it. If your intuition and your gut is saying, we’re just skimming the surface. We’re not getting to the root of the issue. And or if you think that you’re solving the problem, but then there’s a bunch of other problems that are popping up. It’s because you’re, you’re maybe getting there, but you’re not there yet. And so now where you’ve gotten to is, oh, so he has to have this procedures that this procedure that a lot of newborn babies have, or little tiny babies have called a frenectomy. And when his tongue is able to sit in the right place in his mouth, and then it affects how he swallows, it affects how he breathes it’ll affect how he sleeps. And so, so one of the places, so Lindsey did all this on her own.

0 (14m 55s):
She was just, you know, had no quit finding the right specialist. And then it came time to, okay,

1 (15m 0s):
You just had the time. It was so weird. The timing is what’s crazy because I do have a little resentment and anger about the loss of time, about all of the issues we had to overcome without the lack of knowledge. And maybe that’s just, I will let that go because I know it’s not going to serve me. But the crazy shit is that if it had been any sooner, we wouldn’t be where we are because he was 10. He had three years of getting out of defense zone and was in a place of

0 (15m 34s):
Cooperation.

1 (15m 35s):
Confidence, cooperation

0 (15m 37s):
Felt better about himself. Wasn’t so angry on the inside. Finally felt understood. Didn’t need to stick his fingers in your ears because you follow

1 (15m 44s):
This time. Not only was the timing, right. To begin all of these intensive therapies where they are working inside of his mouth and stretching his tongue

0 (15m 53s):
Y’all that have highly sensitive kids. I mean, I don’t think any kid wants someone in their mouth like that, but highly sensitive kids. I mean,

1 (16m 2s):
Yeah. Shannon, like two weeks ago, it was the first time that this amazing chiropractor went in his mouth and he was being a total, highly sensitive person, like eating her and licking her and telling her yummy, yummy. I mean, he did that for two weeks. And then I finally was like, yes, we’re going in. That’s not an option. And today he had his session and she was like, he allowed me to do things in such a more intense way before I’d put a little pressure, a little this and that. And he was resistance. And today he allowed so much more she’s like, because everything in his head is where it’s supposed to be. And she’s like, his nervous system is just slowly calming.

1 (16m 42s):
And it’s just like, he let me, and I was like, so cool.

0 (16m 45s):
See his nervous system. I mean, these are This, these are the things it’s like, we think that kids acting out, we need to, you know, attack the behavior with admonishment or with other behaviors. But the truth of the matter is, is that a lot of times it’s that they’re trying to tell us there’s something going on with my body. If I knew how to explain it or express it to you in any other way, a way that was more productive, I would do that. Okay.

1 (17m 7s):
But they don’t know how, and as a parent who has a child and as a parent, who’s trying to figure that out. And in the, that process, it is a very hard to know where to start, I think.

0 (17m 20s):
Yeah. Well, and then the thing, so now she knew he was going to have to have this surgery and he’s had these traumatic ear surgeries that you were so kind to share the aftereffects with the freaking green fluid, but legitimately he’s, he’s kind of traumatized from the procedures and the surgeries and the decade of

1 (17m 40s):
Bedwetting. Yeah. Well

0 (17m 41s):
Also it’s uncomfortable, you know, look, it’s uncomfortable to have to go in and have a surgery and then recover from the surgery. So Lindsey was worried about, she was like, I just don’t what, what did you say? Like, I don’t know, you know how to tell like the surgery, the surgery is happening December 15th and you know, I don’t know when I kept him in the

1 (17m 58s):
Dark about what was coming at some point, which was fine because when we started speech, we didn’t know how long it would take for him to gain the proper muscle strength to have the surgery. You can’t just have it. You have to, I don’t know, not even going to try to explain, but

0 (18m 16s):
You have to work up to be able to then have the surgery then you did. And then after,

1 (18m 20s):
So he’s to relax it, it’s going to be a process after which is fine, because he’s going to be home from winter break.

0 (18m 26s):
But what you were

1 (18m 26s):
High once I knew when the date was, and I had it, I was like paralyzed with what do I do with this information? I know it. I know it’s coming. I just didn’t know what to do. I was like, when do I tell him, do I tell him the day before? Do I tell him the morning of, and I just wasn’t sure. And what I know now is that okay?

0 (18m 49s):
I, well, what did I say when you were like, okay, I know this surgery is a month and a half.

1 (18m 54s):
Like you got to tell him now. And I was like, you’re crazy. I probably didn’t say that. But I thought I was like, tell him now you got to plant the seed. You gotta give him time. And I’m sure my first few thoughts.

0 (19m 7s):
Yeah. I think you said you were like, <inaudible> okay. And then you wanted to like, change the subject and talk about something business related or whatever. And I, and I kept going, I steamrolled, I kept going back to it and I was like, wait a minute, you have time to prepare him for this. You’ve got it. That’s a gift to like, prepare him and remember,

1 (19m 24s):
Like, just feeling my heart, jumping out of my chest, thinking that what I know now is like, I’ve always been nervous about surgery. Like not a little bit like,

0 (19m 35s):
Well, this is where I want to tie it in is like, we can have hard conversations, but we have to know how to have them. And so you were like trying to change the subject to avoid a boy, having a hard conversation. And I was like, no, let’s workshop this so that you have the tools to have this hard conversation. And then you can show up respectfully for him. Like, it’s not respectful to tell him about a surgery the day before, or the morning of he’s got trauma around surgeries. He’s 10 years old.

1 (20m 1s):
And she was so classy. She didn’t tell me that she made me figure that out on my own. She was like asking about my feelings. I’m like, bitch, relax. She’s like, no, really? And yeah, that’s what it was. I was like, continued. I was like, what are

0 (20m 17s):
You worried about? And then,

1 (20m 19s):
Yeah. And I was like, and then I got to on my own I’m guess I’m feeling guilty that he doesn’t know. And we’re like whispering to the chiropractor and the speech therapist. So the dentist and everybody knows what’s going on. And at this point it’s on the calendar. And so I felt bad in my body, but I didn’t know why. And you helped me get to because I’m leaving him out.

0 (20m 36s):
Okay. That was part one of my conversation with Lindsey where we cover lots of different things. I think you guys are going to love part two, because really dig into what it looked like to go through the process and have a productive conversation and prepare her son for surgery, amongst many other topics. As our add brains just went from here to there. So look for the next podcast episode, which will be the continuation of our conversation. And in the meantime, I want you guys to go to Mastermind, Parenting dot com slash PRODUCTIVE dash conversation. That’s Mastermind, Parenting dot com forward slash PRODUCTIVE dash conversation.

0 (21m 20s):
That’s where I’m giving you guys my free resource so that you can start having your own productive conversations and have your plan of action. And talk about all the hard things you can do this. I’ve got you. And if you know that you want more support, please go to Mastermind, Parenting dot com and check out my three programs, three beginning programs so that I can start supporting you and getting to know you by.